Building Information Modeling (BIM), Green Building Design (LEED) and lots of other specific design practices like LED lighting or daylighting design all promise to improve building design. Of course, we’ve been hearing those promises for many years, why should now be the time when change escalates?

Energy prices have bounced up and down for years. When I was in college, I won a grant to do alternative energy research from the US Dept of Energy. It was 1980 and I thought energy prices would rise at a rate well above inflation for most of my lifetime. The experts were predicting all the oil supplies would be exhausted by 2000. This thinking of coming oil scarcity was widely accepted at that time. It was wrong.

The ethanol biofuel that I was working on never made economic sense with the continuation of low energy costs. I think we are in a new time when energy costs will rise above the cost of inflation. The discovery of the Marcellus shale gas at many locations around the world will probably keep prices from hitting crisis levels, but cheap energy has finally died.

Many state governments (and much of Europe) have furthered that energy price escalation by requiring reasonably large chunks of their electricity to be produced from alternate (particularly solar) energy. Once these laws are passed and 30 year capital investments made, the laws become challenging to repeal. Think lots of bankruptcies of major firms vs everyone paying a bit more for their electricity. The politicians won’t struggle too long on that choice.

So energy prices will go up, how does that affect building design? Don’t expect too much innovation from design professionals. All but the top, marquis firms get so squeezed on fee pricing that they won’t be investing heavily in new ways to get things done. With the Design-Bid model, the design professional just don’t have a big enough piece of the pie to really force the major changes. Few owners want to pay 30% higher design fees for the promise that life cycle building costs should be lower.

The big changes will come through the design/build or other similar collaborative approaches. The construction industry probably has too many firms for the work available for the next few years. The firms that thrive will have to be offering more than just low first costs. So the construction firms need to innovate to survive. We haven’t had that scenario before.

Hospitals will likely be leading the way, since their many departments each have so many processes that can be maximized and integrated. Consider all the construction (and later energy) inefficiency and waste that typically occurs in emergency rooms, radiology suites, operating rooms, etc. Office buildings, schools, churches, etc will follow.

If you want to stay in the game, you’d better be thinking about how to improve the process (which includes saving energy) in the projects you build. Begin by putting the issue on the table. Now.